Final Uncharted 4 making-of video says goodbye to Nathan Drake

Nathan Drake has made a lot of terrifying jumps, and he'll make many more in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Naughty Dog has said that it means for this to be Drake's last adventure, and it wants the whole game to be a fitting farewell tour for the scrappy hero. That includes one last, incredible leap, which game director Bruce Straley gets a bit emotional about in this final Uncharted 4 making-of video.

"I'm working on this layout right now with one of the last traversal sequences in the game," Straley says in the video. "And there's this one jump, and every single payer that we've watched playtest it stops at the gap and kind of looks, and like questions it. 'Can I make that? It's a pretty big jump'. And they go for it, and you see Nathan Drake flailing his arms wildly, and Nathan Drake reaches out and grabs that last handhold. And that's our last epic jump of the Uncharted series. And that to me is like… I'm getting a little choked up. Yeah. A lot of memories there".

Naughty Dog and actors like Nolan North get well-deserved credit for creating memorable characters, but those sprawling vistas, scrabbly handholds, and gut-dropping leaps have defined the series just as much as Drake's witty comebacks. I've got a feeling I'll know exactly which precipice Straley is talking about when I reach it in Uncharted 4, and now I'll have even more reason to pause before taking the plunge.